Force management systems for use in planning, scheduling and managing personnel in a telephone call center are known in the prior art. Such systems typically include a basic planning capability to enable a call center supervisor to forecast future call loads and the number of servers or "agents" necessary to service that load. Most prior art systems also include a simple scheduling capability which then functions to allocate agent work hours according to the staffing requirements that have been forecast. Agents are then manually or automatically assigned to fill the schedules. These systems usually also include other administrative and reporting capabilities.
Prior art force management systems suffer from many disadvantages. Such systems rely on conventional time-series forecasting techniques to generate forecasts for a large block or unit of time, e.g., a month. These techniques then use fixed factors to decompose the monthly forecast into weekly, daily, and then hourly or smaller increments. This approach is computationally-efficient but lends itself to accuracy only on a macro scale, e.g. month-to-month, as opposed to reflecting real changes in call volumes as they actually occur in the historical data for the call center. Prior art systems thus do not have the flexibility to be responsive to changing conditions so as to forecast future call loads and provide realistic scheduling of personnel to meet the dynamic load requirements of a typical telephone call center.
Moreover, the prior art systems are typically structured around a single call center location. Therefore, while telecommunications switching advances can effectively connect numerous locations together, there is no prior art management system that can provide efficient forecasting and requirements generation at a central location with schedule generation and schedule management at individual dispersed locations. Yet another disadvantage associated with prior art approaches is the inability of such systems to efficiently generate optimal work shifts ("tours") for agents once forecasting is complete. Further, these systems do not have the capability to efficiently generate schedules to satisfy agent preferences, availability and seniority.
The deficiencies of prior art force management systems have given rise to a curious result. In a call center environment, telephone call center supervisors are forced to manage their personnel based on the capabilities of their force management system, as opposed to the capabilities of their switching system and their staffing resources.
It would therefore be desirable to overcome the problems associated with such prior art force management systems.